[scribus] ! ;-)

[joseph harris]

From: "Jeffrey Silverman"
> <snip!>
>> We really don't have a need for those unwilling to genuinely 
>> help Scribus.
>> Scribus has been made available much as someone might invite 
>> visitors into
>> our "home" to share what there is to offer. There is going to 
>> be some limit
>> as to how much and what kind of criticism is acceptable as 
>> part of that
>> hospitality.
>>
>> Greg
>>
>
> Are you serious? I think that taking that stance is on the 
> whole more
> potentially harmful to Scribus (or any open source, 
> community-driven
> project) than getting, *and listening to*, some criticism.
> *Especially* criticism you don't like!
>
> Unless you mean abuse. But abuse is not in any way the same as
> criticism. Well, okay, maybe in some surface ways.
>
> But if you can't listen to all the criticism that's out there 
> then I
> understand where JLuc is coming from, even though I don't 
> completely
> agree with him.
>
> -- 
> Jeff Silverman
> jeffrey.d.silverman at gmail.com
>

That makes great sense Jeff. I hope by the way that I was not 
included among the negatives.

When Louis offers the metaphor of Scribus being like a building 
site I think he has really hit the nail on the head. You can't go 
too far with the analogy because changes to building instructions 
cause delay, whereas the changes to Scribus clearly move the 
project ahead in useability.

In a previous post I was specifically addressing the issue of 
knowledge and popularity related to Scribus. At the moment the 
program is aimed at heavy users of DTP who do their own layout 
work - design as well I am certain. Apart from the feel of being 
in the engine room in overalls, which many people do not like in 
a program, Scribus faces the issue of a few programs dominating 
publishing and that by 'lock-in'.

So currently the market is limited to the developers and the 
'early people' who recognise the value and can handle the 
complexity. It may not yet be time to pay too much attention to 
'user friendly' interface, but when that time comes I am sure it 
will achieve the very high interest and use it clearly deserves. 
At the moment I would have thought the download figure is very 
encouraging.

An anecdotal example of program choice is with a DOS program I 
still hanker for - WordBench - which is a specialised  WP still 
used by quite a few US universities for course work and seriously 
heavy writing. It has a complete listing of reference and 
biography attributions, but is quite a remarkable program for 
fiction and articles. I had hoped it would be developed for 
Windows and other OSs but it seems not. Its limitation now is the 
difficulty of transferring work out of WordBench!

There are many other writer's programs now, but they are for my 
purposes cumbersome.

No program will meet every need of course.

Joseph Harris